Underwater
by gimmeabreakxD
Summary: A hundred lives, a hundred words. Because everyone's drowning in their own secrets, gasping for air, their heads underwater. [DeviantArt's 100 Themes Challenge]
1. memory

i. memory

* * *

Cold feet, mist on the windows. The candle has burned down to a puddle of wax on the table. It flickers; shadows dance on the walls.

He glides his finger over the photograph, over her face. Her smile. Her eyes unseeing, blind to the future. Frozen in a sheet of glossy paper, never growing old. Never dying. Never coming back.

He outlives her, of course. Once upon a time she said it will be all right. Mismatched eyes blink tears.

She's a pile of bones in her grave. In his hands she's a picture. In his heart she's a memory.


	2. insanity

ii. insanity

* * *

He hears them. Every day. They're in there, somewhere, inside his head, between his ears. Laughing. Running around, screaming. Bleeding. Where are you going, they sing. Where are you going, Thomas, sir? Where, where are you going?

Sometimes they grow silent. But he hears them breathing. Exhaling. He feels them crawling around on their hands and knees, dimpled hands outstretched. Scratching at the walls, gasping.

"Dad," someone says. "Dad, it's me."

"Go away."

"Dad—"

"They're listening. They're here. Go, save yourself."

The floor soft beneath him. His arms pinned behind. Where are you going, Thomas, sir? Nowhere, child. Nowhere.


	3. gray

iii. gray

* * *

He smells death. The sickly-sweet whiff of decay, of charred wood and burning hair. Ashes falling from above. Spiraling to the pavement. Behind the clouds the gray sun shines. Hiding, frightened.

A blackened shoe under a dead tree. A child's. Everywhere the scorched remains of ceiling beams, roof tiles, walls. A vulture circles overhead.

Her hair a flowing stream behind her. Pale moon-face, eyes wide: almost human. Almost. She covers her mouth and sobs. In the bleak grayness of Harmonica she wanders, moving among the dead.

"The gods have left," she says.

"We are the gods."

"And we have left."


	4. eyes

iv. eyes

* * *

Across the road her window glows with light from within. Curtains parted. Shadows on the glass: that's her. Another shadow: that's her husband.

Her husband who isn't him. Her husband who is his older brother. Her husband who is unaware of a pair of eyes watching, tracking movements in the dark. Every night, all night.

Leaves rustle in the cool evening air. Dust flying into his eyes. Red eyes. She walks up to the window and slides it up, inhales the darkness. With her husband who isn't him.

The metal cold in his hands. He fingers the trigger and squeezes.


	5. under the rain

v. under the rain

* * *

"Make a wish," Mama says.

The child peers up through the window and sees rain. The sky is blue-black but the lampposts glow orange and he thinks this must be what sadness looks like.

"There are no stars," he says.

Mama smiles, pats his head. She smells of flowers and camphor. On the single bed behind them his little sister sleeps, mumbling, a tangle of rosy hair.

"You don't need stars to make a wish, dear."

"Okay." He turns back, whispers a prayer.

"Done? Did you wish for Papa to come home?"

"No. I wished for the rain to stop."


	6. dark

vi. dark

* * *

In the dark everything has its own color. Birdsong is green, summer storms are purple. Tears are gray. Gray and warm: so very warm.

In the dark the soul cries.

In the dark it dies.

He stretches his hand and runs his fingers on the canvas. Rough. In his mind he sees the brook, the trees, the flowers. Vibrant smears on fabric, the candy-cane swirl of color over color. He gropes for his brush, knocks over paint cans. He smells turpentine from the floor.

You can still paint, they say. Even without your eyes.

But they're wrong, so very wrong.


	7. blood

vii. blood

* * *

He reaches out and strokes her face. She doesn't move.

He brings his mouth to her jaw and kisses it. She doesn't move.

"Isn't it wonderful," he says, "to be here? Just the two of us." Still she doesn't move.

Her eyes are closed and veined purple and blue. He laughs, brushes away her hair. Her beautiful brown hair.

Water dripping on the walls. On her chest a blooming black stain, lusterless. He touches it: warm, sticky. Coppery.

Blood.

He laughs again.

"I've always wanted to lock you in a cellar," he says. "Now you're all mine."

She doesn't move.


	8. family

viii. family

* * *

They sat round the table in silence. Silverware clinking on plates, knives and forks and glasses ringing, clear, dissonant. Bound in a dirty-yellow cone from the overhead lamp. Shadows sharp and dense.

"This is good," the Daddy said.

The Mommy smiled, said Thank you. She went to the kitchen to fetch dessert.

"Daddy," the child asked, "why do you say it tastes good when it's bad?"

Grinning, the Daddy tapped the side of his nose. "Because your Mommy made it," he said.

Many years after the divorce, Dia realized that once upon a time, her parents had been in love.


	9. standing still

ix. standing still

* * *

She wears too little clothing and too much makeup. Painted lips parted, white teeth gleaming. Breathless. Earrings dangling. Curled lashes flutter above eyes made of wine. Buttery hips swaying, neck bared. Sensuous, opulent.

She's intoxicating. Inebriating. Even her name bears a tingle of seduction: a finger on the lips.

And he's a fool, a lovestruck buffoon who's all thumbs and all sweat.

Their eyes lock from across the room and to him the world stands still. Time stops to watch; his heart skids sideways.

I love you, he mouths.

She doesn't notice. The sarabande continues, and the world moves again.


	10. happiness

x. happiness

* * *

Hour one you brush your hair and climb into bed with his arms around you and his mouth on your ear.

Hour two he strums on his guitar and sings a song about growing old and falling in love with someone young.

Hour three you paint your mouth and darken your brows as he watches with a cigarette dangling between his lips.

Hour four you're smiling, polishing glasses and leaning on the bar, talking about how you've searched for the wrong people in the wrong places when the right one has been in the corner all along, playing his blues.


	11. heaven

xi. heaven

* * *

Men in charcoal suits shovel dirt into the hole. Earth's mouth closing, filling up. The coffin disappears.

Someone sobs, someone says Why.

People clutching umbrellas over bowed heads, crying, dabbing at their eyes. The child and her grandfather stand apart, watching.

"Grandpa," the child says, "is heaven real?"

The grandfather sighs and his face wrinkles into a sad, sad smile. "It is if you believe it is."

"Pastor Carter did. Is he in heaven now?"

For a while the man stays quiet and there is only weeping to listen to.

Finally he says: "He is if you believe he is."


	12. hold my hand

xii. hold my hand

* * *

Yesterday your father died you didn't cry. I asked you if I could do anything and you said, "Hold my hand."

I did. And you didn't let go.

Today I heard you singing by the shore and I asked if you were okay. And you said, "Hold my hand."

I did. And you didn't let go.

Tomorrow I know you'll be smiling again because that's the way you are, but when it starts hurting too much you can always find me fishing, waiting, ready to listen. And you can say, "Hold my hand."

I will. And we won't let go.


	13. 4:29 PM

xiii. 4:29 PM

* * *

The rope hangs taut.

Her face a swelling purple, her mouth a crescent scar. Wine-stained fingers, wine-stained lips. Straggly blond hair falls around her shoulders. Around her throat a deadly necklace, a braided death sentence.

In her flowered nightgown she's a ghost of the past. A slice of backward memories.

It's 4:29 PM, and the silence overwhelms.

On the side table lies a folded note that says To Mom and Dad. They'll find it soon enough. Will they shriek, will they cry, will they close up shop?

She waits, suspended. Back straight, arms limp.

Her feet swinging above the floor.


	14. fairy tale

xiv. fairy tale

* * *

He's here again.

Wordlessly he walks up to the shelves, wordlessly he picks a book. He sits at one of the long tables, his back to her.

Wordlessly he reads.

He would turn the leaves with the corner pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Sometimes he would rifle back a few pages. Other times he would stop, put the book back on its shelf and take a new one.

They would spend whole afternoons in silence, immersed in printed worlds, living in the typeface, traipsing along the chapters.

Books smell of fairy tales. This is turning out to be one.


	15. ice

xv. ice

* * *

The moon in the sky glowing against gray. Stars in bloom spearing silver shafts of light. Winds cold and frosty, bitter, blue. Trees shadowed, naked.

She runs on ice, on snow, barefoot. Muddy-white mulch beneath her soles, heaven's frozen tears trodden into earth's face.

She runs on ice, on snow, barefoot. Her hair a stream of coffee-brown, her apron flapping in the wind.

She runs on ice, on snow, barefoot. What of her fragile health, her flimsy breaths? Oh, Vesta would throw a fit.

She runs on ice, on snow, barefoot.

The stars and the moon watch with closed eyes.


	16. sorrow

xvi. sorrow

* * *

The sun is rising and the eastern sky blushes. A faint pink breaking through the gray. Has he been here all night? Standing and staring. Thinking, remembering, sometimes sighing.

Nothing stirs. No wind, no birds. The day is only waking up but it's already dead. In front of him the tombstone lies still. He traces her name engraved in the rock: cold. Like her.

He could have saved her. All the medical books, the years of study, the hours spent awake at night holding her hand, wasted. He could have saved her. He failed.

And they say he's the best.


	17. night

xvii. night

* * *

Darkness falls and muffles the world. Sounds fade and drift past, growing smaller, smaller. Noises disappear as stars come out and dot the sky with piercing points, blue and red and yellow, like flags, like crayons.

He sprints on silent feet, catlike. Swiftly. Under the moonlight a streak of silver. Through the forest, on roofs. No one knows. No one sees.

The door opens and she steps out. The fountain between them. Wide eyes, blue, questioning: Who are you?

"Hello, beautiful." She blinks. Scowls. Starlight on her hair. "It seems destiny has brought us together."

Tonight he falls in love.


	18. innocence

xviii. innocence

* * *

Last night Mama came home with another man. They banged the front door when they arrived and they were laughing and their faces were red.

"No, not here," she said. "Upstairs. Bedroom."

The man was hugging her and trying to smooth the back of her skirt, and Mama gave a funny squeal like when Papa kisses her, and she said she was ticklish right there.

I stood by the kitchen with my crayons and they didn't see me until I went and showed Mama what I'd drawn that afternoon.

"Oh, Aja," she said. They went quiet and Mama started crying.


	19. mirror

xix. mirror

* * *

All he knows is that she's still in love with the father of her children, the father who has left an outline of his shape against the yearly family portrait, a shadowy blotch during contemplative evenings following voices raised in anger, when only the silverware talks and the three people around the table think of a man who left not a word they could fold into their pockets and kiss whenever they're lonely, while he, _he_ who has been waiting for her waits still, noticing for the first time that in the mirror is a man with a broken heart.


	20. illusion

xx. illusion

* * *

The lines on her face deepen as she smiles. Her eyes pale, milky blue, her mouth a thin slash. Cracked at the corners, at the seams. Cheeks wrinkled, sagging. Gnarled hands clasped on her lap.

Death weeps in her eyes.

"We're too old for this," she laughs. Cough-like. "Elli is pregnant. I am to be a great-grandmother soon."

"And I'm too old to care."

"You're very sweet."

He runs his fingers through the remains of his hair. "But it's too late, isn't it?"

"Yes. A little too late." She sighs. "Maybe in another life."

"Yes," he says. "In another life."


	21. hunger

xxi. hunger

* * *

Cold. The night consumes. Murrey hungers.

_Pain._

Waves breaking on rocks: the beach. His stomach growls; behind him a trail of footprints, left right left right left.

"Hello?" someone says. His head swivels, red-rimmed eyes darting. There, on the shore, a child, a girl, warm, breathing. Alive.

He approaches. "Murrey hungry."

The child is frightened; she takes a step backward. Blood inside her, meat, bones, a beating heart. His stomach growls. Murrey hungers.

He lunges forward; the child screams, struggles, water splashing, clothes tearing. Silence. The sound of ripping flesh, a crunch, the song of pink waters.

Murrey is sated.


End file.
